“Ah, there are balls and balls; especially in Paris. No, you must go, you know; it is not a thing from which you can dispense yourself. You need it.”
“Oh, I’m very well,” said Clifford. “I’m not sick.”
“I don’t mean for your health, my poor child. I mean for your manners.”
“I haven’t got any manners!” growled Clifford.
“Precisely. You don’t mind my assenting to that, eh?” asked the Baroness with a smile. “You must go to Europe and get a few. You can get them better there. It is a pity you might not have come while I was living in—in Germany. I would have introduced you; I had a charming little circle. You would perhaps have been rather young; but the younger one begins, I think, the better. Now, at any rate, you have no time to lose, and when I return you must immediately come to me.”
All this, to Clifford’s apprehension, was a great mixture—his beginning young, Eugenia’s return to Europe, his being introduced to her charming little circle. What was he to begin, and what was her little circle? His ideas about her marriage had a good deal of vagueness; but they were in so far definite as that he felt it to be a matter not to be freely mentioned. He sat and looked all round the room; he supposed she was alluding in some way to her marriage.
“Oh, I don’t want to go to Germany,” he said; it seemed to him the most convenient thing to say.
She looked at him a while, smiling with her lips, but not with her eyes.
“You have scruples?” she asked.
“Scruples?” said Clifford.